Pete's Log: audiophile?
Entry #1174, (Music)(posted when I was 23 years old.)
I generally don't consider myself an audiophile ... I don't think I need an excessively fancy setup in order to enjoy music. But over the years I have discovered that I am somewhat picky about audio quality. And my pickiness has become evident again of recent... I hate mp3s.
Since I'm now using OS X (and liking it quite a bit) I decided to begin playing with mp3s again. Apple's iTunes is a neat program, I really like it. I've used it to rip about 400 megs worth of songs into mp3s of recent, bringing my total mp3 collection up to 1.31 gigs. And since I've only got one OS on the hard drive of my laptop these days, there's plenty of room for more mp3s. There's certain advantages to mp3s, and I'm content listening to them for now, but there's certain songs that just don't sound remotely right as mp3s. One such song is Sk8 Rock by Against All Authority. This song can be divided into three distinct phases: violent guitar music, violent guitar music with vocals, and (relatively) slow ska beat with horns and vocals. No matter how much I mess with equalizer settings, I can't get the violent guitar music with vocals portion to sound good. And I know it sounds good in CD form. After spending a bunch of time finetuning the eq in custom mode, it's become evident that the poor sound quality is due entirely to the mp3 encoding. At least I was able to get the rest of the song to sound decent, using (who'd have thought) the piano equalizer preset. One of the next best eq settings for this song was classical. Silly punk rock.
So one neat feature of iTunes that I really like is the ability to specify a unique equalizer setting for every song. I think I'll be making a lot of use of this feature. Playing with equalizer settings is a fun way to procrastinate.
So despite my dislike of how mp3s sound, I'm sure I'll continue listening to them, because they're almost good enough, and they're damn convenient. Besides, I'm listening to them while doing work, so I don't need great quality. Though I think I'm going to rip Sk8 Rock again. The mp3 I currently have is only 112 kbps, I'm gonna try it at 192 kbps and see what happens.
Today was supposed to be productive. Events have so far conspired against me. I will force myself to make do with the current quality of my music and avoid playing with the equalizer for at least a few hours ...